Sports fans had a choice yesterday: watch the Super Bowl or watch
League of Legends via Twitch. I figured the Super
Bowl would easily win out and no one would watch the eSport, but boy
was I wrong.

Above is a graph of League of Legends viewers of the 4 LCS tournament
games on Super Bowl Sunday. (I made the graph from Twitch’s
published data; there are viewers on other services, but Twitch
is the majority.) About 230,000 people were watching on Twitch, a
typical day for
LCS. The surprise is viewership peaked at 286,000 for the last game at
4pm, half an hour after the Super Bowl started. No noticeable
viewer falloff at the 3:30pm kickoff either; just the
usual slump after the previous match ended.

Why didn’t the Super Bowl cut into the
League of Legends audience? It helped that the final
game was an anticipated matchup between two of the best
teams with a strong fan base. The stereotypical
gamer nerd is not a sport fan, so maybe there was no conflict. On
Reddit people noted that a lot of LoL fans are Europeans not
interested in the Super Bowl. (There’s an enormous Asian audience
too.) Some folks said they’d just watch both at the same time.

I’ve come to really enjoy watching League of
Legends tournaments. It’s an enormously popular game, 27
million people play daily and 32
million (8.5M peak) watched
last season’s championship. Riot Games has invested
heavily in making the game into a sports event. The broadcasts are a
lot of fun to watch with smart announcers, good storytelling, and exciting
gameplay. I’ve generally been a skeptic that eSports would become
a phenomenon but League of Legends is winning me over.